n of standing and
ability, interested in scientific research. He had written little; what
time he had been able to spare from his work, had been given to studies
in chemistry whence he had drawn the inspiration for such stories as The
Case of Summerfield. With him the writing of fiction was a pastime, not
a profession. He wrote because he wanted to, from the urgence of an idea
pressing for utterance, not from the more imperious necessity of keeping
the pot boiling and of there being a roof against the rain. Literary
creation was to him a rest, a matter of holiday in the daily round of a
man's labor to provide for his own.

His output was small. One slender volume contains all he wrote: a few
poems, half a dozen stories. In all of these we can feel the spell
exercised over him by the uncanny, the terrible, the weirdly grotesque.
His imagination played round those subjects of fantastic horror which
had so potent an attraction for Fitz James O'Brien, the writer whom he
most resembles. There was something of Poe's cold pleasure in
dissecting the abnormally horrible in "The Story of John Pollexfen,"
the photographer, who, in order to discover a certain kind of lens,
experimented with living eyes. His cat and dog each lost an eye, and
finally a young girl was found willing to sell one of hers that she
might have money to help her lover. But none of the other stories shows
the originality and impressively realistic tone which distinguish The
Case of Summerfield. In this he achieved the successful combination of
audacity of theme with a fitting incisiveness of style. It alone rises
above the level of the merely ingenious and clever; it alone of his work
was worth preserving.

Scattered through the ranks of writers, part of whose profession is a
continuous, unflagging output, are these "one story men," who, in some
propitious moment, when the powers of brain and heart are intensified by
a rare and happy alchemy, produce a single masterpiece. The vision
and the dream have once been theirs, and, though they may never again
return, the product of the glowing moment is ours to rejoice in and
wonder at. Unfortunately the value of these accidental triumphs is not
always seen. They go their way and are submerged in the flood of fiction
that the presses pour upon a defenseless country. Now and then one
unexpectedly hears of them, their unfamiliar titles rise to the surface
when writers gather round the table. An investigator in the for